Fairway Group Holdings Corp., parent company of Fairway Market, announced a $13.934 million net loss in its financial results for its fiscal 2016 first quarter on Tuesday, Aug. 4, and by Wednesday afternoon the company’s stock had lost more than 20 percent of its value.

The company said its same store sales performance in the quarter was affected by a New York City-based competitive opening and an increase in promotional activity. Excluding these items, its same store sales for the quarter were down approximately 2.3 percent. "We are, however, seeing some positive developments in several of our suburban locations from our efforts,” said Jack Murphy, Fairway Market's chief executive officer.

The company hopes a new store format will be a source of long-term improvement moving forward.

"The Fairway team is also engaged in development and design activities for new Fairway locations and we expect many of these elements will be reflected in our new store in the Mill Basin area of Brooklyn, which is scheduled to open in mid-2016,” he noted. "We believe the new format will result in great shopping benefits for our customers while also generating solid returns for Fairway. The new store format, improved gross margin and labor performance and the strategic actions to build our customer base are all important efforts in our long-term improvement plan for Fairway.”

Fairway’s net sales were $193.8 million for the first quarter of fiscal 2016 compared to $198.3 million for the first quarter of fiscal 2015. During the quarter, the company invested approximately $2.8 million for increased promotional activity, in large part related to the continued development of its digital customer engagement strategy, reducing sales by this amount. In addition, same store sales decreased 5.3 percent and customer transactions in comparable stores decreased by 7.4 percent compared to the first quarter of fiscal 2015.